The oldest ice disappears and the Stone Age emerges from it
sciencenorway.no
sciencenorway.no
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-c...
If you don't believe it and want to ignore science, that's your ignorance.
They've been writing the same "decade to live" headlines since the 70s.
People are jaded.
Your comment is a non-sequitur just to personally attack me for a position I didn't take.
Same issue with believing that crime is terrible now, when it's objectively not. And politicians rely on the ignorance of voters to gain power, so they have no interest in making media literacy any better.
This prediction was too pessimistic, but I'm not sure what general point you are trying to make by cherry-picking one article from 14 years ago. Care to expand?
They're trying to downplay or deny climate change, without actually taking a contradicting position, because they know that will actually get downvoted to dead.
It's cowardly and intended to further the denial position.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-30/high-tid...
This strikes me as a Motte-and-Bailey style argument. I don’t think the issue is whether the climate is changing, but people who bang on about the climate changing are typically doing it in service of some policy outcome. If I don’t believe those policies will have their purported effect, or are feasible at the required scale, or if I think those policies with have far more disastrous consequences than maintaining the status quo (for example, mass de-industrialization in order to limit global carbon emissions, which after a series of waving hands, saves the planet or something). Does challenging those policy proposals mean that I refuse to believe in climate change? To a non-insignificant portion of climate commenters, the answer is probably “Yes.”
The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.
It's basically a website to stimulate the good feelings that come from absorbing information, which creates a sort of pathological behaviour in most of the participants.
I mean, you just wouldn't find a gathering like this in real life. Debate and discussion here happens merely for the entertainment and distraction of those using it, and the information and news presented here becomes like a fictional version of real life, except that the fictional is actually real.
While the intentions of this website might be good, I think in the long run it just further promotes the behaviour of hiding away from the world, and as a result is a net negative to those who use it.
https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/six-million-year-old-ice-d...
And they're working on finding even older!
"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"
One of the presentations was on this research, and I was somewhat amazed the new stretch goal is to find 10 million year old ice. More power to them!
Ironically it's made of petroleum, which is the decayed remains of prehistoric organisms.
??? The wax is petroleum, just the heavier parts.
And the wood of the arrow would be gone otherwise.
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/minersoc/books/edited-volum...
AI is in.
We don't have to be slaves to unregulated markets or the oligarchs they naturally breed.
Being out of the news and not having hordes of people trying to ride it's coat tails in a "look at me, I'm a do-gooder too" fashion and trying to push it in various directions for their own gain is the best thing that could happen to it. Let the tech be advanced in the background in an economically and politically sustainable manner even if slightly slower.
Are you talking about carbon credits? Electric cars have probably helped, even though there are trade offs. Solar has been a net positive.
The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.
Amazing how humanity keeps lucking out like this.
Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.
That's because RuBisCO is a terrible enzyme that only barely works; photosynthesis works better the more CO2 you feed it. RuBisCO actually evolved in a higher-CO2 atmosphere and is optimized for that one, not ours. Terrestrial plants today are basically an alien species trying to adapt to a marginally (from their POV) frontier planet.
Now, you could argue that this climate model or that climate model increase net productivity once you take into account land use patterns, population shifts, blah blah blah. You can make these models say whatever you want them to say. Truth is, biomechanically, more CO2 means higher yields with same inputs on the same land, and we are very good at making land suitable for agriculture.
Stronger extremes will hurt crops too.
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
Of course that's mostly going to be poor people, and it's really hard to get rich people to care about that.
> Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too
Wean and drop are pretty different. Many US citizens and Republican politicians have shown less than 0 interest in making progress and the Trump administration in particular has actively sabotaged the effort.
The US, a nation in huge debt, is committed to around $1T in tax subsidies and $500B in loans and other funding for clean energy in the next decade. Private capital investment in that same time will account for another several trillion - driven by these subsidies and the regulations which force industry to adapt (and because clean solutions are genuinely cheaper in many applications).
The government tax subsidies and direct spending (depending on tax projections) are on the order of 5-10% of the discretionary budget (around 2-3 times the annual 'extra' cost above baseline of assisting Ukraine or bombing Iran Feb-Oct which are each on the order of $50B). It's hard to get an exact number of course, since 'funding which decreases carbon emissions' extends way beyond clean energy and electrification. For example, Defense Production Act may be used to fund manufacturing or refining capacity in key areas.
That's a long way from 'refusal' and represents only one country.
Public and private combined, the EU is investing at about the same rate as US, China is investing on the order of about double the rate of the US.
These are very hard problems to solve.
The climate is varying in long cycles, and the deglaciation 20 thousand years ago (last glacial maximum) was driven by a spike in summer temperatures, and this peak has already long passed. Ice ages and interglacial periods have a certain momentum to them, so it takes more than just that to go back to full ice age..
Glaciers don't melt instantly the moment the temperature flips from "form glaciers" to "melt glaciers". They operate on the integral of temperature -- heat. The temperature determines how fast they melt or form.
These melted really, really fast.
There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.
I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.
I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archival-conservation pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases? Rather than there's no information there to lose?
Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for nanopore DNA?"? Does automated lab tech progress, someday make "brushed, handled, dusted, washed, and shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?
Moreover, just being in the general vicinity is enough for us to leave behind contamination, since humans (and all other animals) constantly shed detectable eDNA into the environment. And even if they wanted to deal with this complexity, the budget for an entire project's archaeological testing is often less than my coworkers' monthly token budgets. You might get less than a dozen radioisotope, TL, or dendro tests for the entire thing, let alone anything more expensive.
There comes the undeniable proof that we’re back to the Stone Age!